As Soon as You Know It’s There, You Know What It Is," the authors report on their research into how the brain recognizes things that we see. Their theory is that our visual system classifies objects before identifying them: first we see that there is an object in our visual field, then we recognize the category that the object belongs to, such as bird or car. Then we identify what it is: a pigeon or a Volkswagon.
To me that implies that we see in stereotypes: we see a category before we see a person. That would explain why stereotypes are so pernicious, and why they are so hard to change. Think about racism, for example. Knowing a person of another race isn't enough to overcome or to change all your beliefs about that race.
I am making an assumption that the categories used in visual processing are linked in some way to the categories we used in thinking about the objects and people we see, and another leap from there to the feelings we have in response to those categories, but it feels right to me.
